There is often tension between the resource allocation priorities of local managers or decision makers and the resource allocation priorities of “higher management” or central planners. Balancing the requests of competing local managers, especially when demand greatly exceeds available resources, is often difficult.
Applying only a globally determined set of priorities to a set of competing requests tends to produce unsatisfactory results “on the ground” because the central managers may not be as aware of local conditions and priorities as the local managers. Applying only locally determined priorities is also unsatisfactory for a number of reasons, including failure to take into account the value of those resources most in demand, failure to take into account the relative urgency of the requests by different local managers, and failure to take into account other aspects of the global state of the system.
Examples of situations in which it is necessary to allocate resources among competing requests, include allocation of corporate resources among geographically distributed sites. The corporate resources may be for product development or research, advertising campaigns, real estate development, and so on. The resources to be allocated using a resource allocation system may include transportation resources, equipment resources (e.g., permanent allocation, or allocations of use in units of time), monetary and non-monetary resources, governmental resources, military resources, human resources (the time of people and groups of people), natural resources, and so on.